It’s always nice when old friends of the shebeen drop by to call. Even better when two of them together pay us a surprise visit. On Tuesday, who should come riding in on the news but our old friends Canadian tar sands and the Keystone family of pipelines. From the AP:
The pipeline ruptured Tuesday morning in southeastern North Dakota and was shut down within two minutes by an employee who heard a mechanical bang. An aerial photo released Wednesday shows a black, pondlike pool of oil suspended in a partially snowy field that’s traversed by tire tracks. A farmer told The Associated Press he could smell the scent of crude oil, carried by the wind. South Bow, a liquid pipelines business that manages the pipeline, estimated the spill’s volume at 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons. Keystone’s entire system remains shut down.
And of course...
The spill is not a minor one, said Paul Blackburn, a policy analyst with Bold Alliance, an environmental and landowners group that fought the pipeline’s extension, called Keystone XL. The estimated volume of 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons of crude oil, is equal to 16 tanker trucks of oil, he said. That estimate could increase over time, he added. Blackburn said the bigger picture is what he called the Keystone Pipeline’s history of spills at a higher rate than other pipelines. He compared Keystone to the Dakota Access oil pipeline since the latter came online in June 2017. In that period, Keystone’s system has spilled nearly 1.2 million gallons (4.5 million liters) of oil, while Dakota Access spilled 1,282 gallons (4,853 liters), Blackburn said. In its update, the company said the pipeline “was operating within its design and regulatory approval requirements at the time of the incident.”
I’ve already heard from at least one prominent Nebraskan who asked me to imagine if they’d built the Keystone XL pipeline and, if it ruptured, which it would have, to imagine this occurring in the heart of the environmentally fragile Sandhills region in that state or atop the massive Ogallala Aquifer. I chose not to do this, because the consequences are too grotesque to contemplate. Instead, I took refuge in the shebeen’s two rules about oil pipelines: 1) They leak, and 2) their owners lie.
Look at this mess. Even without the most recent rupture, this death funnel already had spilled 1.2 million gallons. There is no reason to trust the pipeline’s owners that this will not happen, over and over again, because the company seems to have factored in fixing the occasional rupture as part of the cost of doing business.
The rupture in North Dakota occurred within 2 1/2 years of a December 2022 rupture in rural northeastern Kansas that dumped about 13,000 barrels of crude oil into a creek. The company attributed the rupture to a faulty weld in a pipe bend, saying it caused a crack that grew over time under stress.
A report drafted by an outside engineering consulting firm for U.S. government regulators later said the bend had been “overstressed” since its installation in December 2010, likely because construction activity itself altered the land around the pipe. A July 2021 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the four biggest previous spills on the Keystone system were caused by issues tied to its original design, its construction or the manufacturing of the pipe.
Nice to see y’all again. Stop by anytime. And by anytime, we mean when they’re ice-skating in hell.
